Some actresses take any role that will come to them, hoping to climb even from the lowest dregs. But Brit Marling is of the rare breed who refuse to play yet another bimbo or shrieking murder victim. She tossed away those scripts to write her own. In fact, she wrote her first two movies, Another Earth and Sound of My Voice, simultaneously, working on one each morning and the other each afternoon before filming them with friendly collaborators. Those efforts paid off when both films were spotlighted at Sundance and sold to Fox Searchlight, which helped each hit the pop-culture radar through critical acclaim and cult followings.

She returns with The East, out this Friday, a morally complex thriller she co-wrote with her Sound writing partner and director Zal Batmanglij. In it, she plays a devoutly Christian woman who infiltrates an anarchic eco-terrorist group called The East to bring them down from the inside, but then finds that they might have some good points, and she has some major life decisions to make.

As she enters the room at the Four Seasons Hotel in Beverly Hills to discuss her career, the 30-year-old Marling has the giddy charm of someone a decade younger — akin to a college coed who confidently believes she's on the edge of a major life breakthrough. And as she curls up in an oversized chair, her long light-brown hair falling over a plush gray sweater and soft blue pants, Marling's open smile and effusive hand gestures make it easy to believe it, too.

ESQUIRE.COM: Your arrival on the movie scene in 2011 was almost as mysterious as your movies. Where did you come from, Brit?

BRIT MARLING: The first two we made on our own, and they were bought by Fox Searchlight at Sundance. And we stuck with them on the new one.

ESQ: Why Fox Searchlight for three movies?

BM: They're just a really cool group of people over there. They're smart and they care about making good movies and they're risk-takers, and you don't find any more risk-takers anymore. When we were shooting, it was about two weeks before Occupy Wall Street happened, and we had a sense that this was about something happening now and how do we get it out into the world and they were good partners in that.

ESQ: So Occupy was already underway as you were making it?

BM: We were interested in direct action groups, anarchist collectives, and stuff, but it didn't enter the mainstream media 'til later.

ESQ: In Sound, you're the head of a little cult and in Another Earth, a whole planet replicating Earth is discovered. What is it about you and secret societies?

BM: [Laughing.] Aren't you interested in secret societies? I was always very interested in the idea of deep cover, that you take on — I'm an actor, right? I invent characters, play them, but if I get caught acting I don't get shot. What is it about these people in deep cover where they're taking on these assignments, new names, backstories, places to live, and infiltrating groups all at the high stakes of injury, loss of life or career if you're found out? That's so peculiar and what we wanted to find out.

ESQ: You studied economics and interned at Goldman Sachs, but then you left finance. Was it because of the economic collapse?

BM: I think part of it was I found myself in that job and suddenly things I studied seemed very impractical. I was at a bank and the whole model seemed unsustainable, but nobody was talking about that. The population is huge, resources were dwindling, and it all seemed like bullshit to me. I thought, This doesn't make any sense, so why do I want to be a part of it? So I left. I studied economics at Georgetown and went to work at Goldman junior year as an investment analyst in the investment banking division. I met amazing people and loved who I worked with. It just wasn't for me.

ESQ: How'd you know you'd be good as a writer? Had you been good as a kid and put it aside to study things like economics, or was it new to you?

BM: I wrote a lot but told stories out loud. I got kicked out of summer camp for telling stories that scared the other girls so much that they all called their mothers and complained. One way or another I'd been telling stories, but there were no artists or people doing these kinds of things in my family or anyone I knew. In my mind, it wasn't something you could do. It was for fun, so why do it if it's not fun, even if you have to live a small life and it's not... Goldman Sachs money.

ESQ: When you started writing, you were tired of getting stereotypical bimbo or horror victim roles. Were there some you did?

BM: I turned them all down. I was so close to taking a horror movie just because I wanted to call my mom and say, "I'm gonna be okay. I can get a job out here." And you want to make that phone call because your parents think you've gone off the deep end and you think you've gone off the deep end, but then you don't. And somewhere in there, I realized if I really wanted to act, the only way I could do it the way I wanted is if I wrote my own parts, and that turned out to be a lot harder than I thought. I spent a lot of time trying to figure out how to write a script.

ESQ: Do you have 20 failures in a closet somewhere?

BM: I do have some failed attempts because I didn't have that much time at that point. I think part of it was that [Another Earth director Mike Cahill] and I were making a lot of films at Georgetown. We had a sense of what worked and didn't work from a filmmaker's perspective. And then I was reading so many bad scripts as an actor, and sometimes reading bad things from scripts that don't work helps you understand. When you read the script for Silence of the Lambs, it's unassailable. You could read it 100 times. It's hard to understand what makes it work because there aren't any seams in it. But you read something bad, and maybe that's helpful.

ESQ: Growing up, what were your folks like? Were they creative?

BM: There were no creative people for a living. I grew up in Chicago and Dad was a painter but did real estate for a living. I think artists' primary function in society is seeing thing differently from other people and then have a set of skills — writing, painting — that can make work communicate and share the way they view things differently. In the beginning, you don't think you have anything of value that would add something to the conversation. It's hard to give yourself permission to do creative work because you have doubts about whether you're any good at it.

ESQ: Do ideas come easily to you?

BM: Yeah, because I have this thing where I think you have to convince yourself that ideas don't belong to you, that they're plentiful and out for the catching. You just go out in the air with your net and you grab some. If you think ideas come from you, then you get frustrated if they don't come, or you get possessive of them. But if you believe that ideas are everywhere, in the ether, just looking for custodians to take care of them and share them, then they're freer with you and they come to you more. Also, you share them readily with people and when you communicate with people, you learn how to share and tell them and that makes you a better storyteller.

ESQ: Who are your influences and inspirations? Do you want to direct, and are there any genres you want to do still?

BM: I want to do comedies. I just gave a graduation speech at Georgetown yesterday. Zal was there and he was like, "You're so funny! You have to make a movie where you're funny!" I love that more, and it's actually closer to my personality. As far as people I admire, I think right now Rebel Wilson — she wrote all these plays in Australia and put 'em on herself. She was going to be a lawyer and had a change of heart and boom. She's smart, funny, sexy, and a cool human being. She's writing her own TV show now. Her attitude was "If Hollywood doesn't make roles for me, I'm going to make them myself."

ESQ: What was the importance of making your character a Christian in The East?

BM: I love the questions you ask. No one ever asks that. I think she is a really religious person. She has all of this feeling and a desire to connect to something bigger than she is. Organized religion and Christianity is the way that she does that. When she goes into The East — most anarchist groups are anti-organized religion — I think her spirituality actually deepens and broadens from that experience. I think what we're all deeply desiring of is to get out of ourselves. We're living in a time where it's all generation self, Instagramming photos of ourselves. It's a really strange time, and I think Sarah is longing to get out of herself and connect with something bigger and more meaningful.

ESQ: So does faith of any kind drive your work?

BM: I'm a deeply spiritual person, or deeply desiring of it. I want to believe that life is more than the tables and the chairs in the room, that there's all sorts of unseen and unspoken things that we can tap into. Spirituality is a part of that, the belief that it's bigger than yur undersgtanding. I always thought that my understganding was so limited, that there was no way I'd have the sensory perception or intelligence to divine what's going on.

ESQ: Would you take a different kind of female role now that you're calling the shots more?

BM: What's interesting to me is reinventing how women are looked at. Like Salt — that was a movie written for a man but they changed the gender and had a woman play it. So what would a movie like that be like if you wrote it intending for a woman to play it, and how do we convey that they're strong and powerful as men and how are women sexy in a different way than we've seen, away from stereotypes perpetuated by the men telling stories? What's it going to be like when women start writing, producing, or acting from a female perspective of what's badass and keep her shirt on? They're all questions that...

ESQ: That you will solve.

BM: Thanks!

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